bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) (01/18/89)
I just got a product announcement in the mail today, and the letter began, "Dear Customer". I'm shocked and amazed. :-) Paul DuBois dubois@primate.wisc.edu rhesus!dubois bin@primate.wisc.edu rhesus!bin
kolding@june.cs.washington.edu (Eric Koldinger) (01/18/89)
In article <122@indri.primate.wisc.edu> bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes: >I just got a product announcement in the mail today, and the letter >began, "Dear Customer". > >I'm shocked and amazed. :-) Well, at IBM, 'customer' is defined as 'anyone not currently employed by IBM'. -- _ /| Eric Koldinger \`o_O' University of Washington ( ) "Gag Ack Barf" Department of Computer Science U kolding@cs.washington.edu
jkrueger@daitc.daitc.mil (Jonathan Krueger) (01/19/89)
In article <6961@june.cs.washington.edu>, kolding@june (Eric Koldinger) writes: >Well, at IBM, 'customer' is defined as 'anyone not currently employed >by IBM'. Well, if we go by IBM's verbal communications, such as product announcements, press releases, the special vocabulary of their sales critters, and so on, this definition is used consistently. If we go by the lexicon of their behavior, however, "customer" is defined as "anyone who has the power to decide to buy IBM equipment", as opposed to "user" which means "anyone who has to use IBM equipment". You can tell which you are with this simple test: if your IBM sales office returns your phone calls, you're a customer. Don't argue with their decision: they know you better than you do. Similarity to database vendors living or dead is not a coincidence. I recently reached a vendor (not RTI) on my fourth phone call. He apologized for failing to return my previous three. "On the contrary, I'd like to thank you," said I. "The reason I was calling was to get information on your company and product. You have given me some very valuable information, principally about what kind of support I could expect after the sale." This same company had a wonderful new meaning for the word "opportunity". They asked me "what kind of opportunities are you looking at?" At first I thought they meant area of application, like an accounting opportunity versus a personnel opportunity. That wasn't it. Then I wondered if maybe they meant user community, say a military opportunity, for whom they'd send a different sales critter. This was closer; I was honing in. It turns out that for them "what opportunity?" means "what organization has a signed purchase order in hand right now that needs a vendor's name on it?" If by that definition I didn't have any opportunities, well then I'd provided them with exactly the information they were looking for. They weren't asking me what opportunities they or their product had for me. Ask not. I could name another database vendor that has been promising us long string types "by next month" for almost two years. I could name another vendor, uh no, it's one of the above, whose advertising claims center around performance measurements with units that change between the time you read their ad and the time you receive their report. I could name another database vendor whose support after the sale has included three different answers, all of them incorrect, to a single question about a bug in their product. This vendor's tech support procedures required a minimum of two phone calls and an average of four to obtain each answer. For this quality of support we paid over ninety thousand dollars. We would have paid more if we hadn't caught them trying to double bill us for support included in our initial warrantee period. I could go on and on. In fact, I see I already have. This is the perspective from which RTI emerges as a company that, on the whole, we're pleased to do business with. It's not that they're perfect, but they've done as well as anyone and better than most. I agree with bin@primate that RTI's tech support does a better job than their sales critters. We've found their licensing mechanisms poorly implemented at our site too. But they've met our expectations on all critical requirements, and they've given us the impression that they're trying to improve in the other areas. We don't love everything about them, but we don't feel that we've been raped. This we can't say about some other vendors. -- Jon --